PW Editors' Picks for August: Fiction

by Staff, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 7/27/2004

Each month Publishers Weekly editors pick the books they consider exceptional. Today we present the editors' picks of fiction for August:

When the Nines Roll Over & Other Stories by David Benioff. Viking, $23.95 (251p) ISBN 0-670-03339-1
Benioff is on a roll. His first novel, the crime drama The 25th Hour, was made into a critically acclaimed film directed by Spike Lee. He also wrote the screenplay for the summer blockbuster Troy. In his latest project, an octet of thoughtful short stories, he takes it down a notch from those high-profile projects, but he definitely doesn't roll over. The book begins with the title story about a jaded hipster record executive who is trying to steal a talented and sexy young singer away from a small label. It's a tautly told tale with a wonderfully evil edge. Hip is hard to do, but Benioff can pull it off, as when the reader follows the protagonist into a series of increasingly restricted VIP rooms: "Tabachnik had been places with four progressively more-exclusive areas, where the herds were thinned at each door by goons with clipboards, turning away the lame." Like a lot of great short stories, it leaves you wanting to continue on with the characters to see where they end up. The other seven stories in the collection are a varied lot, ranging from the tale of a young soldier grappling with the moral complications of having to execute an elderly woman to a drama about a lovesick young man's decision to secretly scatter his girlfriend's father's ashes. The stories are offbeat, but not obtuse, and each one is driven by fully formed characters. This is a superb collection, and it proves that Benioff can handle the long and the short of the fiction game.

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst. Random, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 1-4000-6018-4
It's no secret by now that Furst is a superlative chronicler of World War II, and his new novel is a splendid addition to an accomplished body of work that includes The Polish Officer and the bestselling Blood of Victory. His mastery of the atmosphere of that era--its brusque heroes and heroines, its sudden explosions of violence, its strange black glamour--is the fruit of tireless research and an empathetic imagination. His hero this time around is a blunt Dutch sea captain, E.M. DeHaan, whose sturdy but aging merchant vessel is pressed into service on behalf of the British Navy by the exiled Dutch naval intelligence group in London. Disguising his boat as a neutral Spanish freighter, DeHaan somberly and grudgingly takes it several times into harm's way, ferrying British commandos on a North African raid, taking munitions to the beleaguered British garrison on Crete, and then, most dangerous of all, on a secret mission to Sweden's Baltic coast. The marine details are so authentic the reader can smell the oil and the brine, and the characters who come aboard and into the captain's life--a valuable Polish naval officer in exile, a Jewish refugee who becomes the ship's doctor, a Russian woman journalist fleeing the Soviets, with whom DeHaan enjoys a brief and dry-eyed romance--are sketched with concise brilliance. The book casts such a spell with its exact evocations of time, place and language that one could swear Furst was a Brit writing out of his own experience in 1941 rather than an American writing today.

Fitzpatrick's War by Theodore Judson. DAW, $23.95 (464p) ISBN 0-7564-0196-8
In Judson's spectacular first foray into speculative fiction, the Yukons--members of a puritanical agrarian community that rose to power as the electrical systems of 21st-century society were destroyed in the turbulent Storm Times--dominate the world in the 26th century. Spanning what was once Canada and the U.S., the British Isles and Australia, the semifeudal Yukon empire has a near monopoly on nonelectrical technology. Readers have two windows into this unsettling future: Sir Robert Mayfair Bruce, the book's main narrator and protagonist, and Dr. Professor Roland Modesty Van Buren, the historian who presents and annotates the 50th anniversary edition of Bruce's controversial memoirs. These memoirs detail Bruce's involvement in the brutal Four Points War and his relationship with the man who launched it, Isaac Prophet Fitzpatrick, who has been immortalized as a hero of Yukon society. Judson's use of the twin viewpoints allows him to make points about subjects as diverse as history and heroes, academia and ambition, love and shame. Yet like Heinlein, Asimov and other great writers in the genre, Judson never lets his message get in the way of the story, nor does he lapse into preachiness. This terrific SF debut is sure to be a contender for many awards.

Hark! A Novel of the 87th Precinct by Ed McBain. Simon & Schuster, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 0-7432-5035-4
Recovered from his wounds, the Deaf Man is bent on revenge and determined to rub the collective face of the 87th in the dust of his brilliance in McBain's latest zany romp. After striking first at the woman who betrayed him, the Deaf Man turns to taunting the 87th with cryptic hand-delivered messages (quotes from Shakespeare or anagrams) that are interpreted or misinterpreted with hilarious results. The saga of Fat Ollie's book, which began in Fat Ollie's Book (2003) and continued in The Frumious Bandersnatch (2004), resumes and promises to have a long life of its own. There are a lot of soap opera flourishes to the personal relationships of the 87th crew, and McBain milks them for humor and pathos. Steve Carella faces paying for the double wedding of his mother and his sister. Bert Kling knows his beautiful surgeon girlfriend is cheating on him. Cotton Hawes and his glamorous TV news girlfriend, Honey Blair, are under attack, but which one is the real target? It's vintage McBain, complete with pitch-perfect dialogue, subplots that thrust various precinct cops into the spotlight, a pace that encourages the reader to forget about dinner or a good night's rest, and a plot that teases and tantalizes from start to finish.

Brimstone by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Warner, $25.95 ISBN 0-446-53143-X
Fans of cerebral action adventure novels know that, outside of Michael Crichton, no one delivers the goods like the veteran writing team of Preston and Child (Relic; Still Life with Crows; etc.). As if invigorated by their recent solo efforts (Child: Utopia, etc.; Preston: The Codex, etc.), the two now deliver their best novel ever, an extravagantly enjoyable tale of international intrigue. As their admirers know, one reason Preston and Child thrillers grip is because most feature arguably the most charismatic detective in contemporary fiction: FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, pale and icy, a wealthy and refined but ruthless descendant of Holmes who's very much his own character. Pendergast, as well as other Preston and Child semi-regulars, notably rough-hewn former NYPD cop Vincent D'Agosta, Watson to Pendergast's Sherlock, tread nearly every page of this vastly imagined, relentlessly exciting thriller. The body of a notorious art critic is found in his Hamptons, L.I., mansion, wholly burned, with a cloven hoofprint nearby: the devil's work? Similar killings ensue among a group of maleficent bigwigs who, as college students, once gathered in Florence for a mysterious reason. Also at that gathering was the charming yet sinister Italian Count Fosco, a wonderful character whom the authors have borrowed, with due credit, from Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. In time Agent Pendergast ties Fosco into the killings, as well as a plot to equip the Chinese with devastating weapons and a parallel plot to recover a legendary Stradivarius violin. Erudite, swiftly paced, brimming (occasionally overbrimming) with memorable personae and tense set pieces, this is the thriller beachgoers should stuff into their bags during the coming dog days.